The virtualized server infrastructure of the TikiWiki community

This session presents the virtualized server infrastructure of the TikiWiki CMS/Groupware project. TikiWiki is an open source PHP product with an active community.

For flexibility and scalability reasons a virtualized Xen setup on a stock root server is being used. This setup hosts several web-servers and a database server for the documentation and development sites of the TikiWiki community. The setup also features a periodically, automatically reinstalled server for testing of the current development version of TikiWiki. The servers all run Gentoo Linux, to which updates are automatically compilee on a virtualized management server on the same machine. These updates can then be easily rolled out to the live servers after testing. Configuration management is being done with git on each of the machines and a central git-repository on the management server. This server also does automated backups of all the involved machines and monitors all the necessary services.

The session presents the architecture, technology and implementation of the whole setup. Design decisions will be discussed and special possibilities resulting thereof will be presented as for example quick creation of additional virtual machines for testing purposes. Finally future plans and scenarios will be presented. These are amongst others scalability to more physical servers and easy migration of virtual machines to other servers.